


we'll never get free

by limerental



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gen, Mostly Gen, Post-Canon, Renfri | Shrike Deserves Better (The Witcher), Time Travel, so ciri is an adult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:34:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29399856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: She is there in the woods when the girl is snuffed to burnt cinders. When the monster is born.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon/Renfri
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	we'll never get free

She is there in the room when the sun goes black, her linen cowl dipping low to disguise herself as only a common priestess, wringing a rag in her hands and mopping the brow of the laboring Queen, who sobs more harshly as the light dims and the black stain falls across her spread legs, her moon-round belly.

The wizard stands with hands folded behind his back to watch the event through the tower window, giving no aid or attention to the bowing midwives and handmaidens huddled around the straining woman. When the infant wails into life in the tainted daylight, he swivels on a neat heel and cleaves the cord with a ritual knife, offering muttered reassurance to the mother as he holds his long-fingered hands over the babe, her cheeks pinked with vigor and viscera.

She is there in the room and thinks how easy, how simple. To nab the ornate dagger and twist and gut him. End this now, before cruelty curdles the sweet potential of the little life now testing her new lungs. Before it all goes sour.

She is there in the chamber as the new Queen delivers her pretty lies to her captivated audience. The girl is wrong and twisted. She kills and maims animals, she frightens my own young children, she speaks with disregard for proper court decorum, she is a foul little thing indeed. The wizard listens and offers his condolences, his deepest regrets but of course, he knew this from the start. The bitter truth of her dreadful misalignment. He knows what they must do.

She is there in the woods when the girl is snuffed to burnt cinders. When the monster is born. 

She cannot intervene or risk a fracture in the very course of history itself but to hold herself still and quiet is more excruciating than her own burial and rebirth. She was a princess as well once, a thing of gilt and silk and pomp and now a wraith who must quiet her wailing over the sick, dark injustice, the seeping cruelty, the black and ugly stain.

She is there in the tavern when the Witcher comes, and her heart aches to see him. He is skittish and unknowing, an animal crouching under the stiff cowl of his cloak, cocooned in his tattered armor. She does not go to him, watching from her shadowed corner as he walks and talks as a shade of the man she knew, a flickering portent. Hollow and strange.

He is not yet the man who will cleave himself from heel to crown to protect her, who will crawl free of his own split open body and drag his newborn form across the miles in the scant hope of reaching her in time, turning aside from his own creeds and concepts, metamorphizing. Struck dead and reborn, his medallion given to flame, his self given to history. 

He is not yet her father. 

She is not there in the woods before a choice is made, does not watch by firelight as the monster in the shape of a girl and the creature who will slay her fumble together. She cannot risk being near. What happens must happen. Some part of her is conceived here, not in the way of ordinary flesh and blood, bodies and wombs and entangled hopes, but in the way of a specter wrung out from shattered bones.

She is there in the streets when a cornered animal turns butcher. 

She is there in the streets when the blood wells from the black fissure of the girl’s throat.

She is there in the stricken crowd. She is there.

In another reality, she intervenes. She usurps the wizard, the Witcher, the Queen and slots herself there.

She severes the cord. She sits the child on her knee on a resplendent throne and tells her a story. She holds the girl in the woods and presses her lips to her pale skin, yearning that her touch could slough off the unseen scars and let her step free and clean from the firelight. She holds her, dreaming of sinking her teeth in and drawing out the corruption that haunts every girl like them, every girl at all in a world like this one.

She lays her slain body down in the muck of the street. She lets go. 

Again and again, she is there, as she always was.


End file.
